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Visualizing Philadelphia

Visualizing Philadelphia is the umbrella name for a series of projects initiated in the VizE Lab and intended to explore the possibilities of data visualization in anthropology. Visualizing Philadelphia is based in Krogman Growth Study archive, started by Wilton Krogman. Krogman (1903-1987) was an American anthropologist who pioneered the fields of physical and forensic anthropology during his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1948, he founded the Philadelphia Center for Research in Child Growth for the purpose of developing standards of growth for normal healthy children of elementary and high school age. The Center became the site of the most comprehensive collection of growth data from children in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan region, and the largest longitudinal study ever conducted on human growth in the US.

The vast Krogman Growth Study data collection is now physically located at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia and in an offsite warehouse holding over 70 file cabinets of medical records from visits over several decades. These records provide a detailed history of the growth and development of about 7,500 individual Philadelphia area school children from birth to adulthood (many of these individuals have been recruited into the 8th iteration of the study). This abundant cache of "big data" includes dental and hand-wrist x-rays as well as medical histories and a range of behavioral notes about the children and their families, including employment and residential information. By digitizing and analyzing these rich resources, researchers at Princeton will be able to investigate a wide set of questions that connect a variety of biological environmental and social data sets.

In the pilot research project "Environmental Exposures and Child Development," we seek to trace and visualize the complex relationships among the social and biological variables in the "local biologies" of several Philadelphia neighborhoods. We are contextualizing the physiological data from the Krogman study with a variety of openly public data sets that contain information on the social, economic and environmental history of Philadelphia. By comparing Krogman physiological data from areas where there are sources of contaminants (e.g. dry cleaner complexes, smelting operations, slaughterhouses) with data on children living outside those areas, we seek to identify the particular environmental, and possibly epigenetic, factors on the growth, development and health of children living across city neighborhoods.

Research Activities

The combination of Krogman and historical datasets affords a unique opportunity to integrate socio-cultural and physiological data into courses across the Anthropology Department, giving students unique opportunities to contribute significantly to real world research as well as to experience the interactions between physiological and socio-cultural variables. Specifically, they will curate and analyze the physiological and environmental data, as well as produce their own related ethnographic materials in the region. Moreover, they will have opportunities to design their own research questions, develop analyses and create visualizations as part of this wide-ranging research project.

A new course introduced in fall 2017 on Forensic Anthropology and Epigenetics in Urban America (ANT 309/STC 310) offers students significant hands-on experiences with real-world datasets. The course uniquely provides students with the opportunity to explore the complex interplay of social, environmental, and nutritional factors that affect individual development and health outcomes in urban settings. Some students work with Janet Monge in her lab and learn to perform forensic analysis on the physiological records, such as x-rays. Another group of students work with Jeffrey Himpele in the VizE Lab to select from many sets of social, environmental and historical data. Toward the end of the semester the two groups of students explore connections in their work in order to develop an integrated holistic biological and socio-cultural picture of variations in the urban context. The class uses techniques of data visualization to communicate the composition and analyses of the data they develop during the course. In addition, the course gives students a unique opportunity to contribute to the development of new standards for measuring growth and development that will be based on a larger and more diverse population than used to create the existing standards.

Students in Carolyn Rouse's course on Race and Medicine (ANT 403/AAS 403/GHP 403) investigate the ethical and ethnographic dimensions of the Krogman data. They explore the possible epigenetic effects that environment and socio-economic status may have had on three generations. Further, students will uncover the social life of the Krogman medical data itself, including the initial and emergent research questions, project funders, the curation of data and its storage spaces, how subjects were recruited, and the encounters between physician-researchers and their subjects and parents. Since all data is produced in social contexts, we seek to understand how the categories were used in the growth study itself in Philadelphia, as well as how the study participants and their families navigated the social categories in the demographic data that includes them.

In another new course on Visible Evidence in Ethnography to be taught by Jeffrey Himpele in fall 2018, students will use this large dataset of medical and socio-economic records to learn techniques of data analysis and visualization, mapping, as well as ethnographic documentary video-making and photography.